For the millionth time I wondered how James could do this to me.

"How could James do this to me" I asked Judy.

"You've asked me that about a million times," she said.

So I had.

I didn't know how James could do this to me. I just knew that he had.

Up to now I suppose that I'd thought that life doled out the unpleasant things to me in evenly spaced bite-size pieces. That it never gave me more than I could cope with at one time.

When I used to hear about people who had serial disasters,

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like having a car accident, losing a job and catching their boyfriend in bed with their sister all in one week, I used to kind of think it was their fault. Well, not exactly their fault. But I thought that if people behaved like victims they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.

I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don't volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway. It's not their fault. It certainly wasn't my fault that my husband thought that he'd fallen in love with someone else. I didn't expect it to happen and I certainly didn't want it to happen. But it had happened.